Friday, August 30, 2013

How I've grown to hate that phrase, usually because what follows
is some tale of tribulation.

"Back in the day, we had to load Windows from floppy
disks!." or "Back in the day we actually had to win a game to get a
trophy!"

Well, the video above is an example of what PC gamers were
doing "Back in the Day."

I've been playing around with VirtualBox (the free virtualization platform from Oracle)
and some old operating systems. Why?
mostly to see if I could actually make them work and in the process force
myself to get more intimate with the more esoteric configurations of the
platform.

So in the process of getting Windows for Workgroups running
on VirtualBox I was reminded that "Back in the Day" Windows needed
DOS. Now getting DOS to work in
anybody's virtualization platform is no more difficult than getting the VM to
see your installation media be it real or virtualized. Windows was a different matter but rather
than trail off onto an entirely unrelated tangent I'll just say the experience
proved to be a catalyst that culminated in the video you see above.

VirtualBox is pretty forgiving for stupid mistakes. Being a hosted platform you have direct
access to most of your storage devices and mounting media real or virtual is
pretty much nothing more than a mouse click away.

I was fortunate to have the foresight to make a DOS only VM
to play with during my Windows adventure and that formed the basis for my
VirtualBox retro gaming VM. Other than
some manipulation of autoexec.bat and config.sys and pass-through of my real CD-ROM
to the VM nothing much more than digging out my old game disk was necessary.

Here's a tip about classic PC games in VirtualBox. Turn on the VT-x option. If you're running Windows, however, it's best
to turn it off. To get the full
experience I enabled the sound driver in the VM and set it to SoundBlaster 16
mode.

Once the preliminaries were done, I loaded up my copy of LucasArt's
Full Throttle (1995,) switched to the CD-ROM drive and typed INSTALL.

Surprisingly, everything worked, even the sound
configuration utility which was surprising considering how much trouble I
remember having with it "Back in the Day" when I ran the game on
"Real" hardware.

That's the mechanics of how I got there, now the why...

It's not that I don't appreciate how far PC games or video
games in general have come in the past 20 years or so but there's something
more pure about booting up an old classic.

That I was able to revisit a classic game without scouring
swap meets and Ebay for vintage computer parts was definitely a plus as well. Thank you virtualization...

So as I found myself once again becoming embroiled in a
storyline I'd been through at least a dozen times before I had an epiphany of
sorts.

Why was I spending so much time and effort on a game that
could make Minecraft look cutting edge?

Admittedly, the 320x240 graphics are awful by today's
standards and I've seen better on a Smartphone.

Still, there's an honesty that you just don't see in gaming
anymore.

For its time Full Throttle was a good looking game but it's
real draw was a thoughtful storyline with rich characters. It was almost like spending time with an
interactive novel. Humor, an excellent
soundtrack and brilliant voice acting made up for what may have been visually
lacking.

To fully enjoy it I didn't have to invest in a $1000 graphics
card and a multi-core processor either.
At the time I remember the biggest concern for gaming usually centered around
getting the sound card to work. Video
cards and CPU's pretty much played second fiddle. Most games were written to take advantage of
the mass market hardware that was available.

If your computer could run Windows 3.1 chances are it had
enough horsepower for the average DOS game.
Spending ridiculous amounts of money on hardware that grossly exceeded what the game needed rarely
yielded the results you were hoping for.
In some cases it made the problem worse.

I have a friend who was very much into Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight simulator. He found on moving to the next generation of
PC that his cherished pastime had become unplayable. I will admit, however, with hilarious effects
as a once lengthy aircraft simulation was now completed in mere seconds with a
recorded admonition from the game's namesake saying, "You really screwed
the pooch on that one," as an
animation of your aircraft burning on the tarmac taunted you.

Now it seems that games like Battlefield 3, Crysis 3 and
Metro Last Light demand 4 figures just in graphics and processor power
alone. They might work with less but
you're going to be at a disadvantage.

That's the real difference between gaming now and gaming
"Back in the Day." To get the
most out of a game a few decades back meant focusing on the elements that made
the game the most engaging. Pac-Man is
still popular not for its great graphics but for the way you play it. It's about more than just painting pretty
pictures 120 times every second.

Veteran programmers who've been around a few decades will
tell you how sloppy code has become with the advent of more graphical user
interfaces. They'll tell you that it's
not the interface that makes the code sloppy, it's the lack of concern for
getting everything you can out of a limited resource. These days if a program needs more resources
they just boost the minimum requirements instead of writing more efficient
code.

Consider this, as archaic as it is, Windows 3.1's
installation took only 15 Megabytes worth of floppy disks for a complete
install including the underlying DOS installation.

Microsoft was able to take over the world's desktops with only 11 floppies!

So are things better now? Sure they are. Battlefield 4, Grand Theft Auto 5, Grid 2,
are all brilliant games in their own right.
Unparalleled graphics, the ability to play against anyone on the planet
and able to bring your PC to its knees if you crank up the eye candy.

Yet it seems gaming is less about the game and more about
the competition these days. Multiplayer
gaming is a virtual rat-race and the games are just a finely rendered
medium. Instead of an escape they are
the conflict. "Enthusiast
Class" hardware useless for anything but gaming has a symbiotic
relationship with game developers. More
realistic blood spatters always trump a good storyline.

That's why I spend more time gaming with friends and the
occasional run through an old classic like Full Throttle than worrying about
Phys-X rendered flags fluttering in a fake breeze.

"Back in the Day," it was more about the escape of
playing a game than the top position on a leaderboard.

Monday, August 26, 2013

Take a good hard look at the screen capture above from EA's Origin service. I want you to look closely at the price of
Battlefield 3 Premium edition and the companion DLC subscription. $35 gets you everything Battlefield 3 has to
offer, DLC and all. Oh yeah, and all the
hacks, cheats, draconian DRM and surprise maintenance cycles that knock you
offline.

Now look at the Pre-order price of Battlefield 4. The cheapest option sets you back $60, if you
want a few extra goodies it'll cost you 10 bucks more. Finally there's the Premium subscription that
just like it's BF3 predecessor will set you back an extra $50.

Considering Battlefield 4 will be useless to you within
weeks unless you have the extra DLC, you're dropping a C-note if you want in. Admittedly, nobody's forcing you buy anything
but considering EA's history with BF3 you know there's going to be a bias
toward the "premium" players
and fewer servers available for everyone else.
So it comes down to this...

110 bucks for a game.

I'm not saying it's not going to be great with cutting
edge visuals thanks to an updated game engine and new play modes. For those of you addicted to social media,
EA's even gone to great pains to give you your fix with Battlelog 2.0. A feature they couldn't seem to stop going on
about most of the summer. But...

110 bucks for a game...

Let's put this in perspective... If one of the new consoles
is in your future then Battlefield 4 is going to set you back 1/4 to 1/3 of the
cost of the thing you need to play the game on!
But at least you can win a nifty pair of gloves (MSRP $9.99) for sharing
your fan mania with EA.

$60 is bad enough, $110 is delusional.

Oh I know, I'm old and cheap. Except that most people have to work for a
living and the minimum wage in this country still puts you at poverty level. That means 110 bucks is excessive no matter
if it's you or someone else buying it for you.

Does anyone honestly
think that it's reasonable to pay more for a game than a full copy of
Windows?

I don't and if you understand the concept of value you don't
either. Well, unless you're 12 but if
simulated human carnage is that important to you maybe mommy and daddy need to
explain the concept of NO.

There's no game in the world that's worth more than $60 no
matter how great the PhysX rendering of tattered drapes fluttering through a broken
window may look.

EA and Activision charge
a premium for so-called triple-A titles because they can but mostly because there's
always some frothing fool willing to go along with it. When you overpay for a game you may as well
be back in 4th grade handing over your lunch money to the school bully.

A year from now when the el supremo, primo BF4 bundle is
worth a third of what you paid for it and you can't resell it, I seriously
doubt you're going to think you got good value for the money.

Let's not forget that the game is being released across
multiple gaming platforms including the XBox 360, PS3 and their
successors. That means you're paying a
premium price for a console port designed to work on the most basic of graphics
hardware. Your new laptop with
integrated graphics should be able to run it just fine albeit without all the
eye candy. Upgraded graphics and a few
more maps can't change the fact that in spite of the hype, the game is designed
for the lowest common denominator of the mass market.

Think about it, 110
bucks for a game that may as well be DLC for BF3, has an annoying user
interface (Battlelog 2.0) and a story right out of a bad Call of Duty sequel. EA is trying to make a case for charging more
for less and in that scenario I can't see an endgame that doesn't induce
buyer's remorse.

Here's a bit of advice.
EA is bound to have dozens of sales in the year following the launch of
BF4 if they follow the template of BF3 promotions. If you want to play the game without getting fleeced,
take advantage of them. Send the message
that overpriced pre-orders and triple-figure prices are not acceptable.

Friday, August 16, 2013

Say bye-bye to PC games on Xbox.com. Microsoft is killing it
off as of August 22nd and you have until then to redeem your Microsoft points
which are going the way of the paddle controller. Microsoft's
in-game currency, Microsoft Points, is being retired in
what's been described as a revamp of the Xbox Platform.

PC games purchased through Xbox.com will still function
but it appears DLC and updates will fall to individual publishers. Oh yeah, and you'll have to download your games
to the Games for Windows Live client.

Yes PC gamers, Microsoft
has essentially given you the finger. You're
going to be forced to play your PC games via one of the most hated game portals
in the industry. Remember what fun it
was the first time you played Dirt 2? Oh
the joy of corrupted game saves and denial of access because a server outage kept you from logging in.

At least your unused Microsoft points will be worth
something. How much that is, however, is
yet to be determined.

Oh yeah, except if you don't happen to have an Xbox 360 in which case
you're encouraged to "contact support" The link takes you to a nondescript form not unlike those
"Send an error report to Microsoft" dialog boxes that show up when
Windows crashes.

Hopefully he has more in mind than the buggy and
annoying Games for Windows platform.

So there's the meat, now comes the potatoes...

Look at this...

"Yes, I have joined Microsoft where I will be focusing
on making Windows a great platform for gaming and interactive entertainment...I
think there is a lot of opportunity for Microsoft to deliver the games and
entertainment customers want and to work with developers to make that happen,
so I'm excited to be here."

Ok, I have a question not covered in Microsoft's FAQ ....

How do you make Windows "A great platform for
gaming" when you've pulled the rug out on PC gamers?

The only thing Microsoft has ever done for PC
gaming is Direct X. The rest is just a
bunch of DRM. It's not that anyone had
any great love for the PC gaming experience of Xbox.com but this announcement
leaves PC gamers twisting in the wind.

The announcement doesn't even give a hint as to what
Microsoft's future holds for PC gamers wanting to continue in their
ecosystem. It seems the only answer, at least for now, is that you're out of luck
if an Xbox isn't in your future.

They've essentially left PC gamers trapped within a broken
platform to continue to suffer it's atrocities without any recourse. They don't even get to participate in the"
revamped" rewards program!

Then Microsoft hires a former Valve exec who somehow managed
to get booted from one of the most successful PC game portals in the
marketplace. By the way, he was the
"Director of business Development."

Oh, that's right, he's a "marketing" guy which means a lot of
happy talk with no substance, just like this week's announcement.

It seems most of the announcements from Microsoft these days
revolve around epic reversals triggered by a clueless misreading of their markets. I don't expect this latest transgression
against their customers to be any
different. In fact I'd wager that's going to
be one of Holtman's first projects.

Maybe Microsoft is due for a round of layoffs...in its marketing
department.

Friday, August 9, 2013

John Carmack thinks virtual reality is the future of
gaming. So much so that this week he joined Oculus VR as their Chief Technology Officer (CTO). In case you didn't know (and how could you not!) Oculus VR is the creator of the Oculus Rift VR headset; the new gaming
headgear designed to give gamers a more immersive experience.

Oculus VR and specifically Rift have taken priority in
Carmack's professional life with Id Software now coming in second place. I suppose it's no surprise considering the lambasting
Id's taken over the delay of Doom 4 and the failure of Rage. Lest we forget Id's parent, Bethesda, who's
been turning up the heat on the developer over the haphazard progress of Doom 4.

At last year's QuakeCon Carmack was an ardent cheerleader
offering up free copies of Doom 3 BFG to Kickstarter supporters of the fledgling
project. Unfortunately the game wasn't ready by the
time the development kits came out. So
investors got a copy of Hawken instead and a choice of "store
credits" or a full refund of their kickstarter pledge.

Carmack's gone "all in" with the Oculus Rift
evidenced by almost every recent photo op showing him wearing the latest
incarnation of the device. Want more
proof?

“I have fond memories of the development work that led to a lot of great
things in modern gaming – the intensity of the first person experience, LAN and
internet play, game mods, and so on. Duct taping a strap and hot gluing sensors
onto Palmer’s early prototype Rift and writing the code to drive it ranks right
up there. Now is a special time. I believe that VR will have a huge impact in
the coming years, but everyone working today is a pioneer. The paradigms that
everyone will take for granted in the future are being figured out today;
probably by people reading this message. It’s certainly not there yet. There is
a lot more work to do, and there are problems we don’t even know about that
will need to be solved, but I am eager to work on them. It’s going to be
awesome!”

Carmack believes that VR for gaming is the next
big thing just like 3D gaming was in the
early 90's. He could be right. I mean at least everyone SEEMS excited about
the prospect of wearing an oversized scuba mask on their head while tripping
over the sofa.

Yes it's true, 100% of people "surveyed"* are
excited about the project and when they try it out 75% of them throw up
immediately afterward.

That's just one of the hurdles the Oculus Rift
has to overcome. Low resolution, bulky
design and limited compatibility with current games are some of the others.

That Carmack has switched gears from dodging
tomatoes over Rage to cutting edge hardware really isn't a surprise. Much like the departure of Bill Gates from
Microsoft (even though he retains his chairman status) there comes a
time when a founder's creation evolves beyond its creator.

In the case of Gates he initially embraced the
role of futurist (remember his book, The Road Ahead?) before settling into philanthropy.

Founders generally aren't your standard cubicle
dwelling types. The fact that they
strike out on their own instead of accepting the confines of someone else's
creation proves it. They have a vision to
bring to fruition. The creative drive
trumps all other concerns.

To hell
with the TPS reports!

That Carmack has so closely aligned himself with
Oculus VR is entirely within character.
It's a chance to invest his energies once again in a more creative
direction than Id could provide. Let's
face it, 3D gaming may not have happened
without him but 20 years later it's been done to death. No matter how good Doom 4 is, it's just
another FPS.

Consider that dragon slain even if Doom 4
doesn't have a ship date. I have a
feeling Id was becoming more cubicle than muse for Carmack. If his VR prognostications come to pass
expect him to move on shortly after the term "VR gaming" becomes
ubiquitous.

* survey respondents consist of Me, myself, I
and a bunch of other people I made up from IGN posts...

Propaganda isn't a new idea.
As technology advances it must evolve to ensure the message still
reaches its intended target. So it's no
surprise that with wars increasingly fought by the proxy that technology
affords, gaming becomes an attractive medium for the message.

America's Army was the progenitor of propaganda gaming and is widely touted as being
the most realistic military simulation available. Of course it shows the U.S. Army (the
developer) in a favorable light and is an admitted recruitment and PR tool for
the armed services.

China followed suit
in 2011 with "Glorious Missions" initially only meant as a training
tool for soldiers within the PLA (People's Liberation Army.) It soon grew popular among Chinese gamers who
regularly enjoy the so-called "Red Games."

"Glorious Mission Online," however, takes
propaganda gaming a step further than just a recruitment tool. The game includes a new campaign mission
based on a long standing conflict with Japan over a group of small islands that
both countries claim as their own.

One of the most popular genres of video games is commonly
referred to as the First Person Shooter(FPS) with billions made on such
franchises as Battlefield, Medal of Honor and Call of Duty. Games like these generally place the player
in the role of a combat soldier in front line action against a backdrop of a
fictitious war.

While game scenarios may be loosely based on current or past
conflicts, the most popular are exercises in pure fantasy. Entertainment and possibly an outlet for pent
up testosterone are the only objectives.

Glorious Missions Online, however, is blatant about its
subtext.

To "bolster national defense education"

It's disturbing not for the violence or obvious propaganda
but rather for its context. If, for
example, a new version of America's Army were released with a campaign built on
the premise of toppling Iran's current leadership the result would be no less chilling.

Glorious Missions Online features Japan and its allies
including the U.S. as the opponents.
It's also no coincidence that the game was released on the 86th
anniversary of the PLA.

Is it just an amusement or a thinly veiled statement of
intent from a fading political philosophy?
All we can hope for is that the battles stay confined to the game.

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Until further notice the Midagedgamer Report will no longer be regularly published.

Due to an apparent lack of interest and readership it's obvious to me that my energies are better put to other pursuits. There still may be gaming related articles published but a regular weekly gaming news report won't be one of them.

Thank you to the few who showed interest but as they say, it's pointless to beat a dead horse.

Saturday, August 3, 2013

There's been a whole lot of talk about how great the cloud
is. Now you can have all of the services
that once required a roomful of servers at your office with nothing more than a
fast Internet connection.

It's great isn't it?
I mean all you have to do is log on to your little PC, Smartphone or
whatever and there's all your crap just waiting. No begging the IT guys to get your deleted
emails back, no suffering through "maintenance windows" and no more
going to the office just to open a file.

Everything is in the "cloud" and it always works
all of the time...[sic]

Except when it doesn't.
I'm in IT and I've seen the thunderstorm the cloud can cause. Thing is, you can't get away from it. Even if you're a gamer.

Take the popular game portal Steam. Steam has never been
easy to nail down when it comes to finding saved games, hardware setup files or
even screenshots taken from within the client.
The assumption is that everything should flow from the client and nobody
should go poking around the file system for anything.

Except we have to.
Why?

Because of the "Cloud"

Steam began migrating its entire game library to something
called the Steam Cloud a little over a year ago and the results have been
mixed. While it's very convenient to
always have the most recent updates to your game library close at hand no
matter whose machine you're logging into the fact of the matter is it doesn't
always work. When it doesn't the results
can be devastating.

Considering how far games have advanced from just a bunch of
belligerent pixels to epic experiences rivaling a Hollywood Blockbuster it's no
wonder that people get upset when things go awry.

In my own experience I've found that the average Triple-A
title can occupy 150 to 200 hours before I'm done with it. That's over a week of my life down the drain
if my progress doesn't get saved.

And that's what's happening...

One of the more popular titles on the Steam service is a
game called Grid 2. Being a new title it
was written from the outset to use the Steam Cloud. That means nothing gets stored locally, even
single player games. That also means
that if anything goes wrong with the files in the cloud or corruption occurs
those files are useless.

Steam treats cloud services as ubiquitous and infallible. That means you could upload corrupt files and
the Steam servers will happily replicate them to every other PC, console or
connected device configured to use the service with your selected title.

There are ways of finding cached copies of game files but actually
locating them is an exercise in finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. Why?
Because Steam (Valve) doesn't think you need to know where they are.

But we obviously do...

There's a tired old adage that goes, "Never put all
your eggs in one basket" and if
we're honest, a cloud doesn't make much of a basket to start with.

This is a gaming blog so I'm not going to offer you tips on
retrieving you lost contacts from Office365
but I can give you some help in locating local copies of your saved
games. Here's a tip, find these files
before something bad happens and save them somewhere else. It's common sense but we gamers frequently
ignore anything that doesn't involve playing our games.

First off, even if you don't use Steam there's a standard
location in Windows based PC's to look for saved game files and sometimes Steam
will actually put stuff in there too.
Actually, it's where it should be stuffing this crap but Steam has to be
"different."

Look in the following directory, you may have to turn on
hidden files in the folder views to see it.

C:\Users\*logon-name*\Documents\My
Games NOTE: *logon-name* is the username you log onto
windows with.

In XP and older Windows PC's it will be more like C:\Documents and Settings\*logon-name*\My
Documents\*gamename*\saves (or savegame or backup or whatever)

I can almost guarantee the chances of finding anything
useful in those folders these days is just about zero, however.

If you're an avid Steam user things get more complicated but
the path to glory starts at:

C:\Program Files
(x86)\Steam\userdata\*********NOTE: replace the asterisks with the 8
digit number you find in your path. That
number corresponds to your Steam User ID.

Under that folder are a bunch of subfolders with
numbers. Each number corresponds to a
game you've installed. It's within these
folders that you'll locate the local copies of Steam saved games, settings,
etc.

They may be in subfolders with names like backup, Remote,
local and the like. Check Steam forums
if you get lost, someone is bound to know the exact location of the files
you're going to need.

Once you find your files copy them somewhere safe and don't
forget to regularly update them. That is
unless you're ok with a 6 month old saved file.

As big an evil as EA has become in the past decade. ( I
still hate them for securom) they tend to keep local copies of saved data in
the standard: C:\Users\*logon-name*\Documents\My
Games. Of course they've already
started copying Steam features like local copies of game installation files so
they'll probably get weird too.

If you're on a Mac and a gamer, well, god bless you for your
tenacity...

That said, most saved game and settings locations start out
in /Library/ApplicationSupport

Mac's tend to like to group everything together in their
folder structure so if you don't find what you need in a subdirectory of the
path above there are hundreds of forums that can point you in the right
direction. Some games may even let you manage
your saved games from within their own interface. Just remember that what you see in a Mac
folder is really an abstraction of how things are really organized under the
fluffy packaging. It is based on Unix
after all.

As for Linux, anything goes.
That may require a visit to the game's forum to find the exact location. Steam tries to mimic the windows client
folder structure, however, within the user's home folder like this:

Thursday, August 1, 2013

The fireworks have come and gone and the heat of summer came
on full force in the northern hemisphere.
So what happened in the gaming world?

Comic Con 2013 in San Diego brought more next gen console news,
Steam's Summer sale was just as epic as ever and EA apparently thinks gamers
are more interested in social networking about their games than actually
playing them.

Before we get too deeply into the month that's passed,
however, let's take a look at this week's news.

A few weeks back I went through my old PC game boxes and
after looking at them spread all over the family room floor, decided I should
do something other than just shove them back in the closet. The resulting project turned into a video series
called Gaming History by Game Box during which I held up two boxes from Lucasarts.

They were Star Wars: Battlefront and Battlefront 2 and at
the time I described them as being
basically Battlefield 1942 set in the Star Wars universe. So guess what, now that EA's been chosen by Disney,
(who acquired Lucasarts) to develop the game properties it seems Battlefront will be coming back and developed by of course, Dice.

All we know at this point is the game is due out in 2015 and
development has just begun. It's not a
stretch to think that it will likely be powered by Dice's Frostbite 3 engine which will be a bit long
in the tooth by then. Since Star Wars
games rarely use the latest development platforms and are developed primarily for
consoles, it's a good bet the new Battlefront (or Battlefront 3) will be no
different.

Seems retro is a theme so far, so I'm going to go with it...

I've been waxing nostalgic lately. So much so that I dragged out my old Atari
8-bit computers and did some Retro gaming. Pac-Man, Zazzon and Castle
Wolfenstein set fire to my Plasma TV screen and made it's speakers sound like a
misbehaving R2 unit on Tatooine.

Back in the day being a gamer took a bit of imagination and
a lot of patience. As I listened to the
galloping beeps of a 90K floppy disk topping off all of the 48K of memory in my
Atari 800 I was taken back to my teenage years.

Back then, games came in boxes. Digital delivery meant loading up a cassette
or floppy and hoping for the "right" noises to come through your TV
speakers. Almost without fail, the box
art was always cooler than the actual game.
I actually knew people that would throw away the games and frame the
boxes.

Why this trip down memory lane? Because of an updated version of one of the
oldest FPS games predating even the first Unreal engine. It's Rise of the Triad and now
it's been re-released almost two decades after it picked up where Wolfenstein 3D left off.

Lots of people went to a lot of trouble to make this
"reboot" of the classic title look better while staying true to the
original. From the gameplay videos and
screenshots it appears they succeeded.
Well, at least partially. The
game definitely looks better but if we're honest it's on par with Unreal
Tournament 3 at best. In other words,
the box art is better than the game.

Still, if you're the type who wishes their favorite old game
could get a more modern upgrade then Rise of the Triad may be worth a
look. Especially when it's only $14.99
on Steam right now.

EA is still droning on about all the wonderful social
networking features of upcoming Battlelog 2.0. This week they were tweetingabout how you could compare your stats to
others based on your geographic location.
Wow, isn't that great. With all
of EA's online "services"(battlelog, autolog) you'd think they could
figure out a way to find your friends online without going through the gauntlet
of their DRM and authentication BS. That
goes double when those friends happen to be in the same room! Let's not even get into the requirement for
most EA games to be online for single player!

Bah!

On to last month's news...

Microsoft had a big reorganization that ended up doing
little more than annoying their employees.
Windows updates don't come from the Windows division anymore and Phones
have been thrown in with keyboards and Xbox's.

Anyway...

Julie Larson-Green took over the reins of the Xbox. If the name's familiar it's because she
occupied one of two spots created after the end of Steven Sinofsky's rule over
the former Windows division.

She oversees the new Devices
and Studios Engineering group that includes the Xbox and anything else with
a button and a Microsoft logo.

By the way, if you hate Windows 8 and the Office Ribbon you
can send your hate emails to her. She
was in charge of both of them.

Comic Con San Diego was interesting this year and both Sony
and Microsoft were there with their next gen consoles...

San Diego Comic Con happened and while it's no E3 the lines
definitely blur between gaming and fantasy.showing off games like "Dead Rising 3" for the Xbox 1 and "Octodad:
Dadliest Catch" for the PS4 not to mention Batman: Arkham Origins for PC
and current gen consoles.

Considering most of the most popular movies and television shows in the
past decade have been based on comics it's no surprise that the event's become
a barometer of pop culture. Games fit
perfectly into the medium and any game publisher or console maker would be
remiss to ignore the event. Microsoft
and Sony have gotten the message and showed up with their next generation
consoles

If you're into Cosplay and gaming you may want to think
about attending next time around.

The big Summer Steam sale has come and gone but it left
behind a lot of smiles...

The Summer Sale began on July 11th almost to the day it started
last year. This year's edition featured
many of the same opportunities including daily, hourly and flash sales. Voting made a return as well with related
discounts generally in the 70% or better range.
.

Also returning to this year's event was the occasional
"503" error on launching Steam when rabid gamers got a little
overexcited. If it happened to you just
think of it as delayed gratification.

New this year were the trading cards (badges) which are tied
to (discounted) game purchases, random "drops" based on ownership,
crafting of new "badges" and of course voting.

Borderlands 2 was on sale along with most of the DLC (as of
7-12). Grid 2, Bioshock Infinite and all
your favorites were either on sale or soon would be. Most were discounted 50% or more by the end.

The sale ended July 22nd.
If you want a hint as to when it starts next year keep an eye out for
the Killing Floor Summer Sideshow Event.
It usually starts a week before the Summer sale.